One search box for Texas public work, instead of a login per buyer

Texas publishes its public construction work. State agencies, the highway department, the school districts, the cities, the counties, the university systems: it all goes up somewhere, and a qualified contractor is allowed to bid it. The work is not hidden. It is scattered.

The scatter is the actual job. A state agency job posts to the ESBD. A highway job posts on TxDOT's letting calendar. A high school gym posts to a district portal that district bought from a vendor you have not heard of. Fort Worth runs one system, Austin runs another, and a county three miles from your yard has a page with a PDF sitting on it.

That is a login for every buyer, a password reset every quarter, and a morning gone before you have priced anything.

This page maps where Texas work actually posts, then covers the three things that decide whether you can bid once you find it: your registration, your bonding, and HUB.

Where the work actually posts

Two of those rows are worth more than the rest of the page.

The ESBD is where state agency solicitations go up, and you can read the whole board without an account. No login, no trial, no sales call before you see a single job. New postings land daily, which makes it a habit rather than a project: five minutes with a coffee beats an afternoon once a month, because a solicitation you find in its closing week is a solicitation you cannot price properly.

The other one is TxDOT, and it deserves its own section, because what the highway department publishes is not a list of jobs. It is a list of prices.

The bid tabs tell you what a Texas job actually went for

TxDOT publishes its bid tabulations as an open dataset on data.texas.gov: a rolling record of the previous 24 months of lettings, refreshed the same day. Every bidder on every contract, by name, with their number against each line item.

That is the closest thing in Texas construction to seeing your competitors' pricing with their signature on it. Three things about the shape of the file, because they catch people out.

It is one row per bid item per bidder. A single highway job is hundreds of rows. You are not reading a list of jobs, you are reading a spreadsheet of unit prices, and a job only appears as a job once you group the rows back together.

TxDOT's own engineer's estimate sits in there as if it were a bidder. It arrives under the vendor name "Txdot Engineer's Estimate". Skim past that and you will count the state as competition, and on a thin letting you will read TxDOT as the low bidder on its own job. Pull it out of the bidder list and it turns into the most useful column on the page: what the owner thought the work was worth, sitting next to what the market said.

Contracts get let more than once. One contract in the file was let in December 2024, then let again in August 2026 against a lower estimate. A job you lost, or one that went up while you had your head down on site, can come back around, and the tab tells you what it took to win it last time.

One more state worth knowing. A contract with the estimate published and no bid results against it yet is not a broken row, it is a job that has not been bid. In one 30-day window, 11 of 94 contracts sat in exactly that state. That is the nearest this dataset comes to a forward look, and it costs nothing to check.

The school districts are the buyer people underrate

Texas school districts build with voter-approved bond programs. A bond passes at an election, and then it pays for construction for years afterwards: new campuses, additions, roofing packages, HVAC replacements, athletic facilities, portable relocations, bought in packages by a purchasing department whose job is to keep buying until the money is spent.

Each district registers its own vendors, which is why they feel like work. It is also why they are worth the hour. Registering with a district that has just passed a bond puts you in front of the same buyer over and over for as long as that program runs, and district construction departments are small enough that the purchasing agent learns your name.

Pick the districts inside your drive radius, find the purchasing or procurement page, and register with the ones running a live program. Which districts those are shifts at each bond election, which is the reason to check rather than assume.

Get on the list the state mails from

Reading the ESBD is free. Being told when something matching your trade posts is a separate thing, and it is the Centralized Master Bidders List.

The CMBL is the Comptroller's bidders list. You register your business against NIGP commodity codes for the work you actually do, and agencies buying under those codes pull from the list. It runs $70 a year to stay on it. That is the entire cost of sitting on the list state buyers shop from.

Two practical notes. Choose your commodity codes deliberately, because they are the whole filter: a concrete contractor coded only for general construction gets the wrong mail and misses the right mail. And your CMBL record is where HUB certification gets attached to your business, which brings us to the part that changes who calls you.

HUB is the highest-return afternoon in Texas

The Historically Underutilized Business program sits in Government Code Ch. 2161. Certification is free, the Comptroller's Statewide Procurement Division issues it, and applying is an afternoon of your time.

Here is the mechanism that turns it into a ringing phone. Under Government Code s.2161.252, an agency looking at a contract worth $100,000 or more decides, before it solicits, whether subcontracting opportunities are probable. Where they are, a bid that arrives without a completed HUB Subcontracting Plan is nonresponsive. Not marked down. Not scored lower. Nonresponsive, which means the envelope does not get opened.

So the prime bidding that university science building is not being generous when it goes hunting for certified subs. It is protecting its own bid. It has to find them, document that it looked, and name them in the plan it files with its number. Being certified and findable is what puts you on the list it works from while its own clock is running.

That is also why HUB belongs next to CMBL rather than in a drawer. The certification rides on your bidders-list record, so a prime searching for a certified concrete sub in the county it is building in finds a business with your trade codes already on it.

Whether your business qualifies is a question the Comptroller answers on the application itself, and it costs nothing to ask. The bid-ready checklist puts it alongside the rest of the paperwork a Texas buyer wants in the folder.

Bonding decides whether you can bid before your price does

Texas public work is bonded work, and the thresholds come from Chapter 2253 of the Government Code, the McGregor Act.

The solicitation itself usually asks for bid security on top of that. If you have not bonded before, start the conversation with a surety agent before a job you want appears, because a surety underwrites your financials and your history, and that takes longer than a bid window does.

Now the flip side, which is the reason to prefer public work in the first place. You cannot put a mechanics lien on public property in Texas. The prime's payment bond stands in for the lien, and it is the better instrument, because behind a bond sits a surety whose whole business is paying claims, rather than an owner with a cash-flow problem.

Two dates make that bond yours. If your subcontract provides for retainage, s.2253.047 wants notice of it to the prime on or before the fifteenth day of the second month after you start delivering material or performing labor. After you start, not after you finish. First day on site in March means that notice is due 15 May, so it wants to travel with your first submittal package. Send it certified or registered, because s.2253.048 asks for that specifically. Then, once a claim goes unpaid, Chapter 2253 lets you sue on the bond on the sixty-first day after you mailed notice, with reasonable attorney fees recoverable.

That is month-bucket arithmetic rather than day counting, the same shape that governs private lien rights, so run both through the Texas lien deadline calculator instead of a wall calendar. Retainage on Texas jobs walks the money side of the same clock.

One list, searched the way you think about work

That is the map. The reason it is on an AEC Stack page is that keeping it open by hand is the part that stops happening in a busy month.

Dealflow pulls public postings into a single list you search like an inbox. Expired postings are hidden by default. Type the thing you build, and you get live records for it, each row leading with the buyer, the city, the closing date and the likely trades. Filters add a type, a metro, a sort, and a match-my-profile toggle, and active filters become chips you can pull off one at a time.

Click a row and the full record opens beside the list: who is buying, where, the dates, and a plain-language summary of what the work is. Open Bid Source drops you straight onto the buyer's own portal at that posting, which is where the bid gets submitted anyway.

Tell it once what you build, which Texas metros you cover, and your minimum and maximum job size, and the same profile drives the matching and the briefing that reads the feed for you.

From found to chased in one click

When a posting is worth chasing, Track in pipeline turns it into a deal on your Ops board with the title, the value and the scope carried across. From there it lives with the rest of your work: stages, quotes, notes, follow-ups.

That is the loop. Found in the list, read in a minute, tracked in a click, chased like any other job, without retyping a thing.

What it costs

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, taken when the invoice is paid.

Every posting in the list is a public record. That is the point of it: the state already published this work, so you pay nothing to look, and nothing to keep looking.

Start at Find Work and search the thing you build. Then pick one buyer class from the table, register with it this week, and start your HUB application while you wait. Where work is starting in Texas is how you find the private jobs that do not reach a portal at all.